“That Miserable Continent”: Cultural Pessimism and the Idea of “America” in Cornelis de Pauw

Abstract

The story has been told several times before. In the late eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, the United States representative at the French court at Paris, hosted a dinner at which both American and French guests were present. Among the French guests was also the well-known philosophe Abbé Raynal, who in the course of the evening got on his favorite theory concerning the general degeneration of animals and even humans on the American continent. Irritated, Franklin felt the need to vindicate his fellow Americans and therefore asked all present to rise from their chairs, “to see,” as Thomas Jefferson later reported, “on which side nature has degenerated.” The result left no room for doubt. The Americans were “of the finest stature and form, while those on the other side were remarkably diminutive, and the Abbé himself, was a mere shrimp.”¹